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Previous Article | · | copyright notice | · | Next Article |
Garbage In, Garbage Out, How to Clean Up Your Mind.
An AIA review of Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge.
Written by Bruce S. Thornton
Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999, 279 pp., $24.95.Reviewed by Gretchen Passantino
© Copyright 2003 by Gretchen Passantino.
Plagues of the Mind, by author Bruce Thornton, Cal State Fresno classics professor, echoes my disenchantment with the typical American social sciences educational philosophy that cultural advancement is bad and that a “return” to ancient or pre-industrialized cultures is a return to human harmony with nature. I didn’t at first think how his thesis could be viewed as controversial.
I remember my public elementary and secondary history classes almost universally painted pictures of ancient and Native American (in the 1950s and 60s we called them Indian) civilizations as meccas of nobility, peace, and simple environmental integration and Christian European civilization as a demonic attack on the natural world. But that was then and this is now. Surely academicians had, in forty or fifty years, learned that this view was untrue.
Even as a child I had known things weren’t that black and white. I had lived in India and I hadn’t seen human triumph in harmony with nature; I had seen mass starvation, malnutrition, homelessness, epidemics, and death from the lack of modern agriculture, medicine, construction, and sanitation.
I remember my mother paying small street urchins to carry small baskets of her purchases from the market as her way of helping them stay alive since it was illegal under the Hindu government to interfere with their karmic suffering by simply giving them funds for food. I remember feeding my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the Brahma bull that lived in front of our apartment building, better fed and cared for than the homeless littering the streets because he was considered a divine incarnation. I remember daily stepping to the inside of the sidewalks as the donkey drawn death carts moved along, the driver and his helper poking the bodies lying on the edge of the sidewalk to distinguish the dead from the barely living so the dead could be piled into the cart and taken outside the city for burning. I remember looking out our apartment window at night at the smoke across the city on the banks of the Ganges River where funeral pyres burned without ceasing, cremating the bodies of the dead to liberate their souls more quickly to be reincarnated as higher life forms. I remember my father trying to explain to us young children why the Indian widows believed it was God’s will for them to throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres to burn to death so they could join them in karmic advancement.
As I became an adult, a Christian, and a critical thinker I began to understand that what I had experienced in India was not an anomaly. In fact, the Hindu religion played out its religious consequences in the mass suffering that has plagued that subcontinent for millennia. I studied the writings of ancient historians and read about the remarkable archaeological findings in Central and South America. As an undergraduate Comparative Literature major I immersed myself in the literature and oral traditions of pre-Christian Africa, Asia, and the Americas. I saw that civilizations built on animism, polytheism, and pantheism could harmonize human sacrifice, slavery, exploitation of the local environment, and economic disenfranchisement of all but the elite with a philosophy of cosmic divine determinism and redemption by human effort.
Even though my professors continued to spout the politically correct devotion to primitive naturalism, I assumed that the weight of the evidence eventually would wear them down and they would recognize reality.
So I was surprised when my children were taught history in private school (in the 1980s and 90s) and this maudlin sentiment had not changed but intensified, and added were strong doses of condemnation for Westernized industrialized urbanized capitalized modernized and whitized civilizations.
Could it be that the myth was still rampant? According to Thornton, the myth of innocent naturalism still predominates our educational systems because neither educators nor students know how to think critically and thus are prime targets for the propaganda, the “intellectual toxins,” of liberal academia. Of course, I was actually not quite as clueless as I have painted here, but it still never ceases to amaze me how someone who is committed to an ideology on the basis of emotion rather than evidence can completely ignore both facts and reason in his blind pursuit of self affirmation.
When I read the customer reviews of Plagues of the Mind on Amazon.com I immediately focused on the four that were critical. Here, I hoped, I would find whatever counter evidence or counter arguments existed to challenge Thornton’s views. What a disappointment! Instead of evidence I found emotive name calling, instead of argumentation I found the fallacy of “everyone knows.” Critics seem to have no trouble calling Thornton’s work “conservative silliness,” “nonsense, full of “peculiar prejudices,” and “irresponsible.” Thornton is accused of “hiding in a comfortable conservative closet,” and one critic sighs that, in effect, it would have been better not to have printed this book and thus saved the otherwise sacrificed tree for future hugging. None presented sound arguments or persuasive counter evidence. While some critics have used academic forums for more articulate criticism, the Amazon.com critics voices represent the man, the general population educated like I and my children were, and they demonstrate the truthfulness of Thornton’s main thesis: “After centuries, despite being awash in information, we are just as prey to misinformation, half-truths, gratifying superstitions, pleasing myths, and outright lies as any seventeenth-century Salemite reaching for a torch as he eyes suspiciously the neighborhood crone” (xvi).
Although the bulk of the book (pages 89-224) examines three realms of false knowledge, “Romantic Environmentalism,” “Golden Age Red Man,” and “The False Goddess,” these are merely three examples of how bad thinking and wrong gathering and analysis of evidence have produced false knowledge. It is critical thinking and comprehensive research that Thornton encourages, and fallacious arguments and selective research that he denounces. These lessons on good research and thinking are invaluable for any reader, even if one begins the book disagreeing with his treatment of the three issues. Additionally, Thornton’s lessons provide the readers with the principles of critical thinking and research that enable him to approach a new subject well equipped to weigh the options and adopt genuine knowledge instead of false knowledge (or, as one friendly and humorous reviewer termed it, “stinkin’ thinkin’”).
Chapter one, “Knowledge is Virtue,” is a nice balance of criticism and training in critical thinking. Thornton distinguishes between mere “facts” and “knowledge,” and between knowledge and wisdom. He gives several examples of popular information trends that proved, through critical analysis and the accumulation of evidence, to be promoting false views. I was most interested in his summary treatment of the 1980s and early 90s belief that long term, repeated sexual abuse among children could be “forgotten” by the victims through a process of “dissociation” and “robust repression,” only to be “recovered” through intensive, long term clinical counseling by therapists using dubious and anecdotally affirmed procedures that seemed to produce clients more dependent and more emotionally incapacitated that before they began therapy and began to “remember” their childhood trauma. Thornton points out that none of the principles of good critical thinking and good research accompanied this fad, resulting in many lives being damaged, ruined, falsely charged both criminally and civilly, and in some cases ended through suicide.
Chapter two, “Feeling is All There Is,” points out the importance of maintaining objectivity and restraining one’s emotional impulses in order to ensure that one’s investigation of a thesis will not be colored by appeals to emotion or one’s research conclusions sabotaged by blind subjectivity. In fact, Thornton has not picked this issue at random as merely one of the causes of “plagues of the mind.” He is convinced that with the rise of historic Romanticism, confusing feelings with facts has infected nearly every aspect of academic endeavor. Contrary to what Forrest Gump fans may think, throwing off the shackles of reason, intelligence, and discretion does not produce a world of idyllic innocence, wealth, and fame. Thornton points to the facts of history to conclude, “Unfortunately, everything in history – that ‘frightful monument of sin,’ as Lord Acton called it – tells us that human misery and suffering and cruelty are the result, not of reason itself, but of its lack; not of a paucity of feeling but of an excess of destructive passions” (26).
Chapters three and four, “Discontented with Civilization” and “Tragedy and Therapy,” present Thornton’s argument that the rejection of critical thinking and the embracing of subjective emotionalism renders us incapable of recognizing the good and bad of the world around us (which, if we are reading Thornton’s book, is a world of urbanized technological sophistication) and the good and bad of other cultures (specifically, the rural “simplicity” of undeveloped or early cultures). Thus, when we are frustrated with daily life, we long for what is “other” with no ability to know for what we genuinely yearn nor for what will bring genuine fulfillment. Therapy, he then argues, has become the religion of subjective emotionalism. We no longer live for divine approval and judgment, but for personal pleasure and freedom from conscience. No wonder, he concludes,
The driving force behind both the schools and the media, the therapeutic vision, can have no use for history. Indeed, it must abhor history’s grim record of human limitations and disregard for individual “feelings.” The recorded past of the human race is, as Voltaire called it, a “tableau of crimes and misfortunes.” Nowhere does it give us any evidence that humans can achieve what the therapeutic vision promises: liberation from the tragic limitations created by our passions and aspirations, escape into the paradise of gratified desire and perpetual happiness. Rather, history testifies to the wreckage of such arrogance and the failure of good intentions and the ruin of utopia after utopia. History humbles us, like the old philosopher who stood behind the triumphing Roman general and muttered over and over, “Remember you are mortal.” Better for those genial optimists Compassionate Man and Sensitive Man that they enjoy popular culture’s gratifying fantasies of sentiment and perfection” (87).
Although Plagues of the Mind is not a “Christian” book, nor does Thornton identify himself as a Christian, the critical thinking and accurate research promoted by Thornton exposes reality as remarkably like God’s Word identifies it: sinful humanity unfulfilled in its own fantasies, in need of redemption by the grace and mercy of God.
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